Jorrit is a boy, the only other boy among my five siblings. He is the oldest son of our parents, and big brother to everyone except Arwen. Of the six of us, he’s easily the most intelligent.

Dreams

The greatest of all dreamers, Jorrit’s great dream is that all other people will realize theirs.

Once, alone à la Boucoule in France, I saw a rainbow nearby. It ended in the mountainside only meters away, but the meters multiplied as I came closer…

Jorrit has never physically chased a rainbow. Yet, he has had to take truckloads of muck from people (such as me (and me (and me))) because of his dreams. They call him a dreamer, which he acknowledges: Yes, I am a dreamer!

Simple start

Jorrit’s childhood dreams started as simple as many people’s dreams: after high-school, he wanted to travel, preferrably by motorcycle. Seeing different places and people, while roaming free was all I think he wanted. Such dreams, although considered by some to be frivolous, are still socially acceptable enough (as long as you grow out of it with time, of course).

Romantic love rules and complicates

Towards the end of high-school, some things happened: his deep dissatisfaction shifted from himself towards society and school. At seventeen he went on a spiritual retraite together with Popko, our father. There he met some changes of insight and also his first love. Eventually, he settled at his love Tineke’s place to live happily together.

There was one problem with his newly found happyness. Avatar, and later Landmark had greatly boosted his urge to change the world. He had left these courses with a feeling that with good-enough planning and persistence the world could be once again turned into a paradise. However, Tineke didn’t much like his more disruptive and revolutionary side. She preferred things to be relatively stable and secure. In the end, Jorrit required quite a bit of Cannabis to make his increasingly boring life and increasingly dull dead-end jobs more bearable.

Pain

But, drug usage and dead-endness notwithstanding, life was good with his lovely Lady. That is, untill she wanted to move on with an older man. To Jorrit, his and Tineke’s ±25 years of difference in age seemed less of a problem, but he obligued.

Then, back to our Dad Popko’s place, where he spend a year or two feeling quite depressed. During that time, he worked for Popko. Eventually, he and Popko clashed more often due to a lack of mutual respect and Jorrit moved to a place of his own in the city of Groningen.

Hope…

During that hopeful time

For a while, life seemed much greather there. He had his own little garden, could get up whenever he damn well pleased and could smoke all the weed he wanted without anyone commenting on these or other bad habits. This would be the environment from which he could start to organize things in order to change the world around him.

But, plans remained plans. No freedom was aquired and no freedom was spread. Society stayed as stubournly stupid as it has always been (for the last ten thousand years, that is).

Lies and truths

Often, I’ve told him: Open your eyes! Look around you! There are plenty of happy people! Sometimes, he vaguely acknowledged this, but only to stop me from acting smug, because the truth is simply too obvious: most people are not even satisfied with their lifes, let alone happy; the world population at large is doing misarable. We’re so dysfunctional that we can’t even preserve the very environment that sustains us.

But, few of us like to hear the truth, even if the bearer of truth caries the good news of liberation.
To protect their cages, the people have done more than ignoring Jorrit.
He has been ridiculed, laughed at and called a Satan.

Travel, after all

Luckily, in October 2005, Jorrit managed to escape the prison-like confines of his own life.
He, his girlfriend and me left for France on our bicycles. I left them there a month later, and, as of August 2006, his prison cell still seems empty.

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